What is the connection between Ryan Coogler's Sinners and Palestinian solidarity?

“Identity is what we endow, not what we inherit; what we create, not what we remember,” reads one of the stanzas in legendary Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish's From now on, you are someone else.

“Identity is the corruption in the mirror which we must break whenever the reflection flatters us,” it concludes. 

In Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a blockbuster horror and historical fiction film, twin brothers Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan, are First World War veterans returning with enough money stolen during their time in Chicago’s organised crime scene back to 1932 Jim Crow-era Mississippi. 

There, they buy an old sawmill intending to turn it into a juke joint for the local Black community, and as an opening act, the twins hire their cousin and Blues prodigy Sammie, played by Miles Caton.

Sammie’s supernatural musical talent opens a rift in time and space where creation and remembrance flow so magically, it not only conjures ties of communal bonding but also attracts a great evil that wants to sever them.

Deeply informed by real historical context, largely US race politics, Sinners’ storytelling is equally rich with its fictional choices by placing the main antagonist Remmick, played by Jack O’Connell, as an Irish immigrant vampire. 

Coming from an oppressed ancestry himself – from the English colonisation of Ireland and their forced starvation of the Irish during the 19th century potato famine, to anti-Irish US sentiments and even the movie’s allusions of ancient Rome’s Christianization of Hibernia, old Ireland – Remmick’s pursuit of “fellowship and love” is largely driven by a pained soul hollowed out by imperial violence.

The 1930s were a pivotal decade for the US, especially for African Americans. The Prohibition Era was about to end, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal economic policies would combat the Great Depression and the general progression of life in the US aimed at serving the wellbeing of those who are white and those, as classified by the US Census, who are white by proximity like the Irish, Italian, European Jews and Arabs despite ethnic discrimination.

Although Black civil society and liberation movements were fomenting towards a greater power of resisting their oppression, for those like the Smokestack Twins and their community, the decade was also that of continued systemic violence on all fronts, political, economic and social.

When Sammie sings the Blues, channelling both the not-so-distant past of slavery and the acutely present Jim Crow laws, Remmick approaches the juke joint to consume his soul in hopes of reconnecting with his own culture and, by turning everyone into a vampire, creating his own soulless community.

Having previously turned a white couple after running away from indigenous vampire hunters of the Choctaw Nation, who famously donated money to the Irish during their British-led starvation, Remmick is ultimately successful in destroying his targets and morphing the vast majority of the juke joint’s Black patrons into fellow vampires.

During one the film’s most memorable numbers, Remmick is joined by his newfound troupe of vampires and sings the Irish folksong Rocky Road to Dublin — a tune recounting the tale of a downtrodden Irishman in search of a better life in England only to be mocked and violently mistreated before his kin arrive to save him.

Ironically, Remmick’s attempts at forging a fellowship of love and unity created the opposite of a true community. The chanting circle of blood-soaked vampires was nothing more than a soulless, demonic jig.

However sublime the horror and beauty of vampires forming this undead community, it is the question of why it is a soulless one that is most alluring.

Intent does not equal impact

In 1887, Mound Bayou was an all-Black community founded by former slaves led by Isaiah Thornton Montgomery in Bolivar County, Mississippi. Two years later, the financially successful and politically powerful Montgomery attended Mississippi’s constitutional convention as the only Black participant. There, he co-signed the legal provisions that would further alienate Black Americans from their voting rights with an “understanding clause” that demanded reading literacy to vote.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, a part of the US Department of Education, more than half of all Black Americans were illiterate in 1890.

“He has virtually said to the nation: ‘You have done wrong in giving us this liberty. You should give us back a part of our bondage,” retorted Frederick Douglass in a speech two months after the convention, lambasting Montgomery’s actions, adding that he hears in Montgomery a voice “born of oppression and despair. It is the voice of a soul from which all hope has vanished.”

Much like the clarity of hearing the great abolitionist Douglass had, Remmick’s assessment of Sammie’s voice saw in it the power of creation that expresses the pains of an oppressed yesterday, the power of coming together now and the promises that a community fulfils together for the future.

While he sings, Sammie’s rift-opening voice showcases the Blues’ West African roots and the Hip Hop it inspires in the future, for example. Unlike Douglass, Remmick’s vision is not one of unity for positive change but homogeneity for personal gains.

The disease of vampirism in Sinners isn’t simply one that transforms its victims into the same monster. When coupled with Remmick’s whiteness and motives alike, changing Black community members into bloodsuckers like himself bars them from the real community they were engaging with to sate the communal thirst he’s grown by abandoning his own past.

The more Remmick desired to reconnect with his own oppressed identity, the more destructive he became with other oppressed communities and, ultimately, the more he became one with the same oppression, be it whiteness or empire or organised religion, that erased his soul.

In much of his work, revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon details the “zombification” of an oppressed people and their culture as deeply ingrained colonial violence, which consequently commodifies their psychic structure as an extension of the colonial power inflicting said violence.

Whether it’s the identity or mentality of the colonially subjugated, the subject essentially becomes a zombie, a mindless labourer performing the coloniser’s bidding for them.

Annie, played by Wunmi Mosaku, is Smoke’s estranged wife and Hoodoo practitioner, an ethno-religion with African roots that deals more directly with the supernatural world.

Annie first assumes they are “hates”, but as Remmick’s plan becomes more apparent, she determines these monsters require an invitation, indicating their vampiric nature focused on not only corrupting living souls but consuming them too.

Also rooted in West African culture and later transforming in meaning with French slavery and colonisation, particularly in modern-day Haiti, “zombified” natives were emptied of their identities with violent oppression externally and violent repression internally.

In his seminal The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon even describes spaces of “dance and possession” as a “huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself. There are no limits — inside the circle.”

Solidarity with the corpses, not solidarity with the cause

Fanon also writes in the same book that “zombies are more terrifying than the settlers”, but as systemic oppression voids bodies of their souls into labouring vessels, what happens to that vessel when it struggles to reclaim its life?

As his own identity is riddled with remembering a past destroyed by colonial violence, Remmick’s attempted return to his roots culminates in cultural appropriation at best and communal destruction at worst.

Envying Sammie’s power to create and bring people together, Remmick’s yearning to feel the same authentic human bond spans outside the parameters of a zombie and aptly into that of a vampire.

If a zombie is allegorical to being emptied into subjugation to oppression, then a vampire is that oppression’s foot soldier who, on that level, actively pursues his own freedom by devouring an oppressed people’s very attempts at liberation.

In other terms, beyond the movie’s context, but not one divorced from the real plights Sinners showcases, Remmick is finally reminiscent of those who claim solidarity with Palestine against the Zionist genocide and occupation oppressing its people. 

Whether it is in lack of material action or culturally appropriating Palestinian identity or directly benefiting from Palestinian suffering, Remmick is a reminder of what solidarity looks like when it fetishises an oppressed community rather than joining it.

In that same space of identity and community wherein lies a people’s power to create for the future, remember the past and fight the horrible reflections of the present, another Darwish poem titled The Mosquito comes to mind on that which sucks the life out of a people.

Its final lines read: “It is a bug that loves your blood and smells it from a distance of twenty miles. And there is no way out for you toward a truce with it except one: change your blood type!”

Yousef H. Alshammari is a US-based Kuwaiti journalist and writer with a focus on international politics and culture

Follow him on X: @YousefWryRonin